The Creation, According to Me

I started a series of posts a couple of years back on the Creation. My motivation to finish them fizzled out, mostly because I wasn’t sure where I was going with them. However, I’ve been thinking about the topic again, and am going to try a different approach, which is simply to walk through what I believe about the origin of people on this planet. My goal is to help anyone who might be struggling to reconcile the scriptural accounts with what is now considered to be scientific fact.

Mormon theology actually makes this a little more challenging than it might be for some Christians. It would be easy to take the story of Adam and Eve, and in the light of modern science consider it simply a symbolic myth, or to consider the story of the creation of the Earth as worshipful poetry. I have spoken with many Christians, and a few Mormons who take this perspective. Unfortunately, one of the many angels Joseph Smith claims to have been visited by was Adam. Furthermore, the creative power of God is very explicit in a number of Mormon scriptures.

So, if we believe Joseph Smith, and I do, we have to find some way to reconcile the stories of the Creation and of Adam and Eve to some form of coexistence with the creation of the world as we understand it to have come into being based on our scientific observations.

For the Creation, honestly, it’s not that hard. Any astrophysicist can tell you how astronomically small the chances are of a world forming in a region of space that will allow life to take root and thrive. The planet has to be close, but not too close to a stable star, it has to have sufficient water, the right kind of composition to have a reasonably strong magnetosphere, etc., etc. And, it has to not get completely demolished by some gravitational hazard or stray comet long enough for life to form.

Scientists typically use probabilities and a principle called Occam’s Razor to conclude that the reason life evolved on Earth was that in the billions-to-one odds, we just happened to be the one. You can’t really argue with that logic, as there’s nothing really to argue against. However, you can propose another plausible reason life evolved here: God made it happen. It’s equally impervious to argument, but given a reasonably powerful entity, and the will to do so, there’s no scientific reason that God could not have changed the trajectory of asteroids, planted the seeds of life, nurtured those seeds and protected the planet from ill-timed Armageddon-sized asteroids until it was ripe for human kind to populate. In fact, if you believe in God, it is far more likely to have been God’s intervention that allowed Earth to produce life, than that He just happened to be passing by as humans evolved, and took an interest.

So, we have a choice: choose to believe that enough infinitesimally unlikely things finally happened on our planet in the proper sequence to start life, or choose to believe that life was placed here, and cultivated, much as many a sci-fi writer has imagined humans might someday terraform other planets.

Like I said, that’s the easy part to reconcile. The Adam & Eve story is a bit more complicated. Adam is supposed to have been the first man, and Eve, the first woman. As I’ve implied in my previous paragraphs, I’m pretty well sold on evolution. So where does that put Adam & Eve? My current thinking is that they were the first children of God on the Earth. Homo sapiens prior to Adam and Eve may have been biologically compatible with them, but their spirits were more like the spirits of animals. Humankind as the spirit children of God sent to Earth began with Adam and Eve.

Were they created from the “dust of the Earth?” I could go either way on this one. I think it matters little whether this is a symbolic/metaphoric reference to all life being literally composed of molecules that were once part of the planet’s crust, and passed up through the evolutionary chain, or whether God literally assembled Adam molecule by molecule. On one hand, that doesn’t seem to be God’s typical MO. On the other, it would make the 1000 year lifespans of the patriarchs much more likely to be literal. Of course, merely believing that the latter is possible increases the likelihood that 1000 year lifespans would have also been possible due to miraculous modifications to existing patterns.

So, yes. I believe in the Creation, but I also believe in dinosaurs. God’s plan for us to grow through this Earthly experience requires that scientific proof of His existence be out of reach. He wants us to have faith, which, at times, requires that knowledge be withheld. The spirit of the Creation story is true, but it is not a science textbook. Its primary goal is to teach us about God and His relationship to humankind, not to teach us about the Earth and the universe.

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